The Guild Wars 2 Thread

[mediocrepoet]

I'm not fond of the sheer amount of sarcasm and snark in this episode. It undermines what is supposed to be an immersive fantasy story.

I have characters in various states of progress through various storylines, so I'm playing everything out of order at this point mostly to get easy HP and unlock elite specs. Anyway, starting the EoD storyline this hit me like a truck. The shift in writing and tone between EoD and PoF is crazy. I haven't played any LW content.

 

[Bigg Boss]

A certain person told me Guild Wars 1 is better.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

anyone sane of mind would tell you that. it's not such a big feat by the way.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Having played both, I am enjoying Guild Wars 2 far more. It is more respectful of my time and it is far less aggravating. I had bad memories of spending several hours being stuck on the Drought in Nightfall. He was the last boss of a mission and it took about half an hour to reach him. The trash pulls on the way to him were nerve-wracking and if you accidentally pulled a second pack of mobs, it was really scary and your party could wipe, and you would have to do the whole mission all over again. And then once you finally did reach the Drought, he burns down your party in less than 60 seconds. I spent several hours on him before I got lucky and killed him. There are abilities you can obtain that could make this fight easier, but they require a huge time investment to obtain (abilities obtained by finding a rare mob and using a signet of capture on it, or stuff that just requires gold, which means farming). When I got stonewalled on the guy you had to duel at the party in Vabbi, I quit. The experience was too frustrating.

GW2 isn't brutally punishing like that. The story fights can be challenging at times but they aren't punishing. If you do die, then you can just respawn and start that fight over again. No need to redo the whole mission. And you aren't stonewalled just because you didn't have a particular build, forcing you to abort an entire mission and go hunt down particular skills that this one boss is weak to. As someone with limited free time, I'd rather spend my time playing this game.

I also find GW2 to be aesthetically more interesting to look at, with visuals being a key part of a video-game. I found GW1 to be overall visually meh, except for Cantha which was dark fantasy Asia. You got to explore China as it was being wracked by a zombie plague, or walk through a creepy forest where gothic vampires live inside petrified trees, or walk across a desolate sea that was turned into jade. But Nightfall was just boring desert. GW2's Path of Fire adds more interesting fantasy areas to Elona, but I don't like how much of it is flat desert. The story in GW1 is almost entirely told through huge, unvoiced paragraph text dumps, and isn't digestible like GW2's story. GW2 doesn't have a lot of "walk half way around the world and risk dying to super hard trash mobs just to talk to this one NPC before walking back" like GW1 did.

Or perhaps GW2 is actually hard, and I don't know it. I am playing a double axe Fervent Force Untamed build. Every time I use a stun, all of my ability cooldowns are reduced by 4 seconds. So if I rotate between two stuns (Path of Scars on my offhand axe, and Exploding Spores as one of my utility skills), then I can pretty much spam any other ability as much as I like. I can heal as much as I need to. I can keep my 50% damage reduction elite skill maintained with 100% uptime. I have 100% fury uptime and always crit, so I can burn down bosses with splitblade and frost trap. I have a pet that can tank. So I'm near invincible and deal crazy damage, unless I lose access to my kit like the final battle of PoF where you use Solothin against the Warbeast. That was kinda hard and I almost died, but if I did die then I wouldn't have been super mad like if I had died in GW1.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I had bad memories of sucking at the game

thank you.

 

[Average Manatee]

"In GW2 I dodge when the red circle in under me, in GW1 I can't dodge and die. Hard games are bad"

 

[Reever]

I'm slowly progressing through both of them in tandem right now. They feel like completely different games to me and even the lore seems very far removed from eachother outside of names and little throwbacks. Gameplay-wise they're both very rich in build variety but I feel like GW2 is way more homogenized because of weapon skills and buff/condi systems.
Overall at least until now I'm enjoying GW1 more because it's just a solid RPG with a fine but generic story and great atmosphere while GW2 feels a lot more like a treadmill where every zone the game has to throw currencies at me to farm and characters that are designed to just annoy you (Braham LS3 for example).

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Path of Fire

Few games have made me swear as much as travelling through PoF's maps. The density of mobs, their respawn rate, and their dismounting abilities make for an aggravating experience. I am supposed to be playing a video game for entertainment, but this is just not fun.

The PoF maps are designed around constantly switching mounts to use their different abilities. Raptor for long distance travel, Springer for jumping up cliffs, and Skimmer for gliding over fluids like water, quicksand, or sulfur. You need to be out of combat to mount up, but since you are constantly being whacked by something every 5 seconds it is very difficult to traverse the map. It also does not help that nearly everything will yank you off of your mount and drag you into combat. Riding through a cave? You get dismounted as a pack of spiders descend from the ceiling. Riding through the desert? You get dismounted by a dust mite you can't distinguish from the desert, and when you kill it, it splits into two more dustmites you have to fight. Riding along a highway? You run into a tripwire and get dismounted. Getting shot off of your mount by a sniper. And so on. (Yes, HoT had snipers that could shoot you out of the sky, but they were restricted to only one small area on one zone, they weren't prevalent everywhere!). And so on. PoF maps only become bearable once you obtain a flying mount that lets you bypass the mobs on the ground.

The high density of mobs and the high respawn rate means that you can't even as much as leave your computer to refill your water without your character being killed while you are away. There are far fewer waypoints in PoF maps, so if you want to teleport to a safe spot while you AFK, then you will have to spend several minutes riding back.

70% of PoF's maps look like this.

My other issue with the PoF maps is that they are overall visually boring. Aside from the Desolation, the maps are almost entirely flat deserts. The snowy mountain in the Desert Highlands, the swamp in Elon Riverlands, and the purple Brandstorm areas are pretty, but they are minor parts of their maps. The only map that overall looks interesting is the Desolation, with all of the blackened rock and the yellow sulfur ravines.

The Air Djinn's floating enclave with the colorful Islamic architecture and the sand magic was cool. It should have been a whole zone. A flying city.

The sulfur ravines of the Desolation.

Inside a Brandstorm cave in Vabbi.

Weird ruined pyramid in the Crystal Oasis.


Another thing that bothers me about PoF map design is that they don't take advantage of traversal mechanics introduced in HoT and PoF. There are no updrafts or ley lines of magic to glide on, no mushrooms to jump on and bounce off of, no lava tubes to hop into, etc. Yes, the new expansions wants to emphasize the new mechanics, the mounts, but I think old traversal mechanics could have been incorporated without usurping the mounts. For example, placing updrafts high up cliffs, so you have to skillfully use the Springer to get up to it.

The absence of Ley Lines is especially criminal. After Mordremoth died at the end of HoT, we began seeing ley lines popping up everywhere. Seeing ley lines spring up right next to Divinity's Reach emphasized that the fabric of the world was becoming unstable. Ley energy running rampant is still happening according to the story but for some reason you're not seeing it in PoF. Show, don't tell game!

On the subject of mounts, I find that the mounts are very... boring. Riding around a giant bunny isn't very fantastical. The only one that is cool is the Jackal made of swirling sand magic. It's a shame really, given how imaginative some of the concept art for the mounts were!

Story

The setup is that there is a four-way conflict between the elder dragon Kralkatorik, the god Balthazar, and the undead lich king Palawa Joko, and the heroes. Cool on paper. Ingame, however, the first 4 hours of PoF are pretty boring. You're just running from one NPC to the next listening to them give you directions or exposit the plot. The Elon Riverlands chapter is literally just you running back and forth across the desert between NPCs asking them for directions to the next map.

During the climatic confrontation with Balthazar, his face bugged out. Floating eyes and mouth syndrome.

I am not fond of how the unwinnable boss fight against Balthazar was executed. I was doing absolutely fine. Then his HP reached 92% and he decided to just stun me and it was cutscene time. It doesn't make him feel threatening. It feels cheap. It would have been better if, the less HP he had, the more his outgoing damage scaled up to unsurvivable levels. That way it would feel like you legitimately lost. Perhaps a future plot objective could be trying to find a way to negate that damage before the final boss battle with him at the end.

Vlast sacrifices himself to save the PC from Balthazar. Unfortunately Vlast's model bugged out during the in-engine segment, before the switch to the prerendered cutscene.

The last 1/3rd of PoF is pretty cool, with the player being killed, journeying through the underworld, reclaiming their name, coming back to life, impersonating Joko's archon and commanding his undead armies, and defending Vabbi from the simultaneous assaults of Balthazar's army and the humongous elder dragon Kralkatorik. I also liked the first phase of the final boss battle where you fought Balthazar's tank mech. The second phase against Balthazar on foot was pretty dull but being able to do the combo attack with Aurene you taught her in season 3 was cool.

I sorta wish we had gotten the Warbeast fight that was implied in Carlyn Lim's concept art, where Aurene was quite visibly strapped into the dragon. She would be screaming at the top of her lungs as the tank extracted more and more magic from her. Would've been visceral. In the fight we got, you can't see Aurene and you're only reminded that she's even inside by a one voice line during the fight (that may or may not have played). You feel more concerned for Kralkatorik, a dragon you had just seen for the first time 2 minutes ago than for Aurene, one of the main characters that the plot of GW2 has been revolving around since season 2.

Plothole: why did Kralkatorik attack Vabbi at the end? (Not factoring in later reveals/retcons from the end of season 4). We are 50 hours into the saga (and 5 years IRL since the vanilla game launched in 2012) and the one constant motivation of Elder Dragons that has been hammered over and over is that they hunger for magic. Nothing else matters to them whatsoever. Not only can Kralkatorik fly, he can turn into a sandstorm. He can either fly so high Balthazar can't hurt him or he can turn intangible. Either way, he has no reason to endanger himself to Balthazar nor any desire to him. He couldn't have been lured by Aurene since Kralkatorik was already lingering above Vabbi before Balthazar's tank stomped through the city, and never had any interest in his children anyway before now.



A rant about powerlevels

One thing I've liked about GW2 (and the franchise as whole) is that up until now, there has been a sense of threat.

In Guild Wars 1 Prophecies, you are just one man. You are not almighty. You cannot singlehandedly fend off the Charr invasion. So you are forced to flee from your homeland of Ascalon. In Factions, you and your entire party are KILLED by Shiro about half way through the campaign, and have to be resurrected by the gods to become their pawns in some sort of divine war.

In vanilla GW2, Zhaitan was a humongous flying dragon. You couldn't just walk up to him and slash at his ankles for 5 minutes and expect him to fall over dead. So the final battle of the vanilla story involved shooting at him with a cannon from an airship

Mordremoth had no body. Or rather, his consciousness had become distributed across a large swathes of Tyria, living in a vast network of plants and flora. There was no hope of burning out every Mordrem vine. So the only way to kill him was to hop into his mind and kill his consciousness.

Balthazar is one of the 6 human gods. He absorbed the power of a Bloodstone explosion that would have wiped out half of Tyria. Half way through PoF, Balthazar stuns and KILLS the PC. At the end of PoF, the PC engages Balthazar right as he is dealing great harm to Kralkatorik (another of the elder dragons, just like Zhaitan and Mordremoth). The PC didn't get any divine blessings from the gods, didn't get juiced up on magic, didn't exploit a weakness, nothing. The PC should have no hope of beating Balthazar. And yet, for some reason, I stabbed Balthazar for 5 minutes and that killed him, just like that. What?



Voice acting

This is supposed to be another continent, and yet I'm still hearing the same coastal city Californians I've been listening to for the past 50 hours. Not very immersive. Pretty disappointing given the lengths that GW2's competition have gone to differentiate different parts of their worlds. In WoW, Gilnean humans do not sound like Stormwind humans, or Kul'tiran humans. In FFXIV, Ishgardians sound different from Lominsans, or Domans, or Garleans, or Thavnairans.

Lex Lang won me over with his voice for the male Charr PC. He sounds like a new man when he returns from the dead, and you can hear the desperation in his voice during the final battle. I think I still prefer Ron Yuan, but I'm no longer dissatisfied with Lang.

 

[mediocrepoet]

It's kind of interesting that I have almost the exact opposite impressions of HoT and PoF as you. I thought PoF was cool with its desert and Arabian influenced settings, whereas HoT is kind of interesting in theory, but in practice it's just traversing a lot of green vine shit in some giant tree where traveling around is an aggravating clusterfuck.

The end bosses of each were interesting in theory, but kind of outstay their welcome (especially Mordremoth), where after you repeat the mechanics enough to get the idea, you shouldn't have to keep doing it. It's more tedious than anything at that point.

Re: power levels and Balthazar - I thought the entire idea is that you were screwed and only able to do it because of Aurene's help. I won't pretend I've been paying all that close attention to the lore or storylines or anything, so...

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It's kind of interesting that I have almost the exact opposite impressions of HoT and PoF as you. I thought PoF was cool with its desert and Arabian influenced settings, whereas HoT is kind of interesting in theory, but in practice it's just traversing a lot of green vine shit in some giant tree where traveling around is an aggravating clusterfuck.

Aside from some parts of Tangled Depths (namely the upper caverns, in between the surface and the Chak tunnels at the bottom), I didn't have difficulty navigating HoT maps. For Verdant Brink, Auric Basin, and Tangled Depths, you enter the map from near the top, so you can glide down below and bypass the mobs and land wherever you want. Throughout Maguuma, you are travelling downward towards Dragon's Stand. There are also lots of waypoints around, so you can teleport to a nearby WP and glide down to where you are trying to go. Even if you aren't gliding down, there are lots of updrafts and bouncing mushrooms so you can gain elevation pretty quickly.

The end bosses of each were interesting in theory, but kind of outstay their welcome (especially Mordremoth), where after you repeat the mechanics enough to get the idea, you shouldn't have to keep doing it. It's more tedious than anything at that point.

The Mordremoth fight does take a little long. Even if you use a top DPS build, there are 5 or 6 phases where you are just waiting for the other characters to open the rifts so you can get back to DPSing the boss again, so the whole thing takes about 15 minutes. For the Balthazar final battle, it seems that the devs learned from the Mordremoth fight. You're never standing around waiting for a timer to expire so you can continue DPSing the boss again. They also give you Solothin, so if you have a low DPS build then you can use the magic sword to kill Balthazar in a more timely manner. The Balthazar fight took me about 5 minutes wielding Solothin. I redid that battle again with my Untamed build and killed him in 2 minutes.

Re: power levels and Balthazar - I thought the entire idea is that you were screwed and only able to do it because of Aurene's help. I won't pretend I've been paying all that close attention to the lore or storylines or anything, so...

It is possible Aurene was the deciding factor. Balthazar did capture her to power up his tank so he could kill Kralkatorik, and he seemed to have been succeeding. It's just unclear how powerful Aurene was.

It doesn't seem like Aurene had absorbed any elder dragon or god magic prior to season 4. When Zhaitan died, Mordremoth absorbed his death magic. When Mordremoth died at the end of HoT, the cinematic showed ley line magic flowing from Mordremoth's tree in Dragon's Stand to Tarir and into the egg, so it seemed like Aurene absorbed Mordremoth's death and plant magic. But then in S3 and PoF, Aurene doesn't use any death or plant magic, and neither the Exalted nor Taimi say that Aurene has absorbed any magic (during a storyline in which we are constantly scrutinizing people and creatures for what kind of magic they have absorbed). Meanwhile, in S3E2 and S3E3, you fight minions of Jormag and Primordus that have death and plant magic, so it seems that those two dragons acquired Mordremoth's powers. AFAIK Aurene was unempowered until S4.

The only other uncorrupted, unempowered dragon we saw was Vlast, Aurene's elder brother. Except he was over two centuries old and was chained up by Balthazar. Aurene only hatched the year prior to PoF, in year 1229. So the PC and a one year old hatchling killed the god of war? The same god of war who had only a few days prior, bested Vlast and killed the PC?

 

[mediocrepoet]

Val the Moofia Boss

Re: HoT, I'm aware it's a matter of preference, but even later after unlocking all zones and most WP, etc. I still think it's more of a pain than I'd like. I like the idea behind the zones, but in practice, I think it's a nuisance.

I agree re: fights. I thought Balthazar's dragged a little (but not bad for the reasons you mentioned), but Mordremoth's could've stood to be reduced to like 2 or 3 rift openings instead of what? Like 5 or 6?

Dragon stuff - yeah, I don't know. I haven't done any LW, played HoT and PoF at roughly the same time on different characters though started and finished them in order. It just strikes me that with Aurene taking part in the Balthazar fight and the having her shield you mechanic that Aurene's instrumental "lore wise" in you not being fried as a mortal. So Aurene wouldn't be able to kill him on her own, but using the power of friendship... blah blah.

 

[Average Manatee]

Right now I remember absolutely nothing about GW2 skills, builds, items, crafting, lore, most NPCs, and really anything else. But I do remember HoT because those maps are cool and if you do the region's big event like 4-5 times you'll have the place memorized like the back of your hand despite all the complexity, along with all the useful shortcuts and glide paths. I can only imagine that the reason PoF's maps are so boring is that players revolted at the concept of something that required knowledge and practice to master rather than 1234FacerollOnMyKeyboard. Instead everything has clearly marked "this is where you use X/Y/Z mount" paths with all the complexity shoved away in the map-specific achievement stuff that you usually ignore unless it's convenient.

That said while I hate PoF's maps I don't recall any problems with being dismounted. I thought you only got knocked off if your mount lost all its HP or something? Most of the time just spamming jump with the raptor past things kept me safe. There was a few obstacles like needing to dismount and clear spider webs blocking a path but those were fairly rare instances. I actually liked getting good at quickly switching between mounts by having them all properly key-bound to switch in seconds and scale obstacles before enemies could hit me and disable mount changing. Though I'm not sure the devs deserve credit for this since it's mostly me being glad at not needing to fight shit. I recall a lot of irritation at actually needing to fight in PoF, things seemed too tanky and there was too much respawn-syndrome killing me because something respawned while I was still in aggro range. Might have been because I was playing Ele, from what I gathered it was one of the weaker classes. Boss and story fights took fucking forever and way more things seemed designed only for group play (which in GW2 actually means just praying people are around).

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Season 4

After Path of Fire launched, Arena Net began pulling developers off of GW2 to work on other projects that never went anywhere. Reading Glass Door reviews paints a picture of mismanagement. A 3rd expansion for GW2 was not greenlit. Knowing that season 4 could be the last, the dev team decided to create season 4 as a climax for GW2's story. There was no way they could have satisfactorily tackled all four remaining Elder Dragons with the budget allotted for 6 episodes, so they decided to just focus on a showdown with the elder dragon Kralkatorik.

The PC versus Kralkatorik, from episode 5. Art by Jimmy Saadoun.


Kralkatorik was established in GW1. He was the father of Glint (a major NPC in Prophecies). In a novel that was released during the leadup to GW2's launch, Glint and Destiny's Edge fought against Kralkatorik, but Glint and a member of DE died in the attempt. Season 2 introduced Glint's egg, which would eventually hatch into Aurene, the granddaughter of Kralkatorik, who would become the big plot device of the elder dragon magic storyline. So making Kralkatorik the big bad makes the most sense, as the characters have the most personal investment in his demise over the other three dragons.

Kralkatorik was also the best choice aesthetically. His jagged black stone and purple crystals and lightning theme is unique. The other two known elder dragons, Jormag and Primordus, are generic ice and lava dragons, and their minions were pretty bland. Not good fodder to stare at for a whole season without a visual redesign, which might have been too expensive for the team. Season 4 is pretty heavy on asset reuse.



Maps

The first map is Istan. It's another mostly boring desert map. The cliff area with the sand portals on top was neat but there isn't much to do there.

The second map is the Sandswept Isles. The main attraction is a huge Asura facility in the center, but the game's short draw distance botches the sight. There are three smaller labs surrounding the cube that had fun puzzles inside.

The third map is Kourna. What you see is what you get. Easily the worst of the 6 new maps.

Same bubble seen in first pic but from inside.

The fourth map is Jahai Bluffs. Another flat desert, but it has been devastated by Kralkatorik's Branded magic, and by the space-time disturbances. At this point in the story, Kralkatorik is chasing after Aurene (the good dragon on the side of the heroes), and has been opening rifts so he can travel to and from the Mists in pursuit. The constant portal spam is tearing apart the fabric of reality, and has caused slices from other places and times to appear. In one pocket, you witness the Charr invasion of Ancient Orr. In another pocket, you see the Maguuma Jungle, before Mordremoth corrupted it. There are also pockets that randomly spawn (pictured above), where you can find that it is suddenly snowing in the desert, or stumble upon a slice of Ascalon. It's a cool idea but underutilized.

Also, the last three maps have areas affected by Brandstorms. (Technically this debuted with Vabbi in PoF, but the story never took you to that area of the map). Within a Brandstorm, you attract lightning strikes if you are grounded and if you are not under cover. So you want to either want to use a flying mount to travel through them, or dash from safe spot to safe spot underneath cover. Branded mobs in these areas have knockbacks and pulls that can move you out from cover. If you are hit by a lightning strike while downed, you instantly die. So these areas can be pretty threatening if you are not careful. Pretty cool. Wish games did more fantasy weather conditions like this. FFXIV has some cool looking elemental weather conditions, but they have no gameplay effects.

The fifth map is Thunderhead Peaks. The first waypoint you unlock is at the top of the mountain, so if you have a Griffon you can soar down the map at high speed. Pretty fun.

The sixth and final map of the season is Dragonfall, which takes place on top of Kralkatorik, who crashed into the ocean. It's a cool idea in concept art, but in game you can hardly see Kralkatorik. Almost his entire body is buried, with only his back spine sticking out of the ground, which doesn't look very different from the usual Branded arches you have seen throughout PoF and season 4. The game engine's short draw distance also really hampers the effect. Gameplay wise, Dragonfall is pretty fun to traverse. The traversal mechanics introduced in HoT and season 3 are brought back. So there are mushrooms to bounce off of, lava tubes to hop in and launch from, updrafts and ley lines to glide on, and you can use Oakheart's essence to spiderman swing through the forest section.

The Dragonfall meta event is disappointing. You run around whacking away at Kralkatorik's scabs. After you gouge twelve scabs, the game says "you won!" and you get teleported to a cliff, and Pact helicopters drop loot chests at your feet. Not very cathartic. Contrast that with Dragon's Stand from HoT, where you fought the serpentine head of Mordremoth, and then clambered across his dead body to open the loot he had stashed in his tree lair.



Mounts

Season 4 introduces two new mounts.

The Roller Beetle travels very fast across flat surfaces and downhill. However, it's momentum comes to a halt if it tries going uphill, or runs into something, and it takes a while to get up to speed. So the Roller Beetle is situationally useful and is ineffective for most of the maps in the game (vanilla maps are very cramped, and expansion maps are very rugged). Fortunately PoF and season 4 introduced a lot of flat desert maps that the Roller Beetle is great on. Dragonfall also has long stretches of road that you can speed down as well.

The Roller Beetle can also smash through walls to unlock new areas. Sadly this ability is underutilized by the map designers. There are only like 3 or 4 walls total that require the Beetle to smash through.

The other new mount is the Skyscale, the second flying mount added to the game. Unlike the Griffon, the Skyscale operates like your usual WoW-clone mount in that it can hover in the air indefinitely. It can also climb walls (an ability that the spider mount was supposed to have but that mount was scrapped because it was deemed "too scary"...). The Skyscale isn't very fun to use like the Griffon. Sadly, the Skyscale is the only flying mount that looks good for Charr characters. All of the Griffon skins are comically small compared to a Charr rider. Also, dragons are cooler than griffons. I wish I could ride my Skyscale, but with Griffon flight mechanics.



Story


Episode 1 "Daybreak"

I have done the Griffon sidequest where you help find the last surviving members of the Sunspears and restored their sanctuary in Vabbi, and became an honorary Sunspear. Why is the game acting as if my character has no idea who the Sunspears are, and is trying to track down a survivor for information about their order? I have the item to teleport back to their sanctuary in my bags.

The licking and crackling of teeth SFX in the male Charr's voice is overbearing. (EDIT: fortunately the sound designer reigned it in after this).

We meet another GW1 party member. If you played Nightfall then Koss was one of the first heroes you obtained. So far, Ogden, M.O.X., and Koss are the only surviving characters from GW1.

Audio wise, this is the buggiest episode thus far. The voicelines for the entire conversation with the corsair captain bugged out. Had to relog to get the voicelines playing. Disappointingly, several of the voicelines for the climax when Taimi is screaming while trapped inside Scruffy also bugged out.



Episode 2 "A Bug in the System

My character is a Charr. He should be just as wide eyed at the discovery of the Olmakhan as Rox. Discovering a new Charr civilization unheard of outside of the four Legions, and one that eschews Legion culture should be very interesting to him.

How does Braham recognize Aurene? Braham has never, ever met Aurene. Not once. He never entered the egg chamber in Tarir that Aurene stayed in until PoF, and he didn't come with us to Elona during PoF. Also, AFAIK Braham knows, Aurene is a baby dragon. We hadn't told him that she grew 10x larger yet. He has no reason to identify that dragon flying overhead as Aurene.

Gorrik and Blish are way more likeable than Taimi. I wish they had been with us since the beginning, replacing Taimi as our resident Asura technobabbling engineers. It would also have prevented Taimi from usurping Rox as the heart of the group.

The last fight where you, Braham, and the boss are being sucked into the malfunctioning teleporter gate and your battle takes place across different locations in Tyria was pretty cool.



Episode 3 "Long Live the Lich"

How exactly was Joko raising people from the dead and bending them to his will? What makes him different from regular necromancers you can play as, who seem to only be able to create mindless flesh minions cobbled together from corpses? Revenants can temporarily summon the spirits/souls of the dead, but they can't put those spirits into a bodily form in Tyria like Joko apparently can.



Episode 4 "A Star to Guide Us"

Seems that Almorra and Glint's voice actors were recast. Not a fan of the new voices. Almorra's old voice sounded dignified, and Glint's old voice sounded like a wise grandma.

Taimi, you never even met Traehearne. Hm... well, Traehearne did become a world renowned marshal after leading the campaign to kill Zhaitan. I suppose maybe he could have gotten a book publishing deal and that's where Taimi got the quote from.

The setpiece at the end where you are trying to escape Kralkatorik, jumping from floating island to island while Blish remains behind and is telling the PC his life regrets right and warning the PC not to repeat his mistakes before he sacrifices himself was good. Props to Blish's voice actor (and the PC's in the exchange too).

I feel Blish's death would have been more impactful had he not been a character introduced just 2 episodes ago. Imagine if he had been with us since the beginning.

First, this comes 20 seconds after I informed Gorrik that his brother died. Undercuts the impact. It also vaguely feels like Taimi is trying to redirect people's attention to herself, as if she can't stand people thinking about another Asura for one moment. Second, you've had this fatal illness for... what? 6 years? And it hasn't killed you yet. And you're still going to be alive 4 years from now. Feels like cheap drama. Also, we've been with you for 6 years. If it was so bad you couldn't focus, we would've noticed.



Episode 5 "All or Nothing"

The forging process of the Dragonsblood spears is cool. They pour crystal containing brand magic into a forge, and around the forge a choir sings, resonating with the crystal and reshaping the energy within. I wish the story had leaned into the magical music idea more.

Kralkatorik and his Branded are aesthetically very unique with the black stones, purple crystals, and lightning theme.

It's also nice to see the Zephyrites show up again, given that they were absent in season 3.

I forgot that Almorra's warband was wiped out when Kralkatorik awoke. She's barely had 20 seconds of voicelines this season. She should have had more of a presence.

The battle of Thunderhead Keep is very intense. Great setpiece. Too bad the camera shake bugged out towards the end. Took me out of the moment.

I liked that you got to fight alongside former foes. Awakened, priests of Balthazar, and that Inquest defector with his big red golem. The Awakened Charr and Sylvari were also nice touches too.



All or Nothing: Requiem

After episode 5 released, Anet put up three short stories on their website that show the aftermath of the battle from the perspectives of Rytlock, Zafirah, and Caithe. They are backstory infodumps and don't really add anything. However...

"I was the runt of the litter. I’d always be the runt of the litter, no matter how many enemies I tore apart, no matter how many Elder Dragons I killed. Even if I was Khan-Ur, I’d always be Runtlock."

How old Rytlock? He's definitely middle-aged. And yet he's apparently still afraid of being called "Runtlock" by some old childhood bullies? He's the Blood Legion Tribune, the second highest ranking leader in the Blood Legion. He successfully campaigned against the ghost army of Ascalon, the Flame Legion, two Elder Dragons, and the human god of war. He is held in high respect among the Charr (and non-Charr!) and has great authority. A Californian video game writer might have an inferiority complex like this, but not a prestigious leader who hails from a warrior culture, and this isn't the leader I followed in the 1-30 Charr storyline.

Rytlock secretly having children of his own and having told literally no one about it makes the "you're not Eir's son! She would have told me so!" scene at the start of season 1 even more ridiculous.

This is not Rytlock Brimstone.

The art that depicts Rytlock Brimstone is really derpy. You know, the bloodthirsty lionman who wields a flaming sword he looted from a royal tomb and desecrates the bodies of his enemies. And he's reduced to this... mouse thing. My guess is that whoever at Anet was responsible for commissioning the art didn't give proper instructions as to the nature of Rytlock and how he should be depicted.



Episode 6 "War Eternal"

Good setpieces. Fighting the shades of the prior final bosses who were absorbed by Kralkatorik was pretty cool, even if it does feel derivative of Mordremoth's story fight.

A nice goodbye scene to end the game on. Kinda undermined that the game actually did continue and Aurene is brought back almost immediately in the next season and everything goes back to business as usual.

It's disappointing that Rox and Gorrick aren't in the epilogue.

Pretty good story. It worked because there was urgency. In season 1, you're just doing boring episodic stuff with no stakes. In season 2 you spend 5 episodes aimlessly wandering around a desert. It wasn't until the last 3 episodes when you were entrusted with guarding the egg and Mordremoth's forces were chasing after it that the story became interesting. Season 3 was pretty much just collecting magic samples for Taimi all season. Here, in season 4, you're fighting an undead tyrant from the beginning, and then you're fighting against a reality shattering elder dragon.



Plothole

What was the entire point of Path of Fire? What was the point of killing Balthazar? Seasons 2 and 3 established that killing the Elder Dragons would destroy the world, since they are entertwined with the laws of reality and keep the world in balance. The deaths of Zhaitan and Mordremoth caused a lot of ley line instability that we see the consequences of in season 3. So killing Kralkatorik was supposed to be bad, and since Balthazar wanted to kill Kralk, that's why we had to kill Balthazar. But we just wound up killing Kralkatorik and replacing him with Aurene as Elder Dragon anyway. So why didn't we just help Balthazar kill Kralkatorik and replace him with Aurene in PoF? Hell, why not have killed and replaced Primordus in S3E5?

Also, we just found out from Kralkatorik that he was once a sane dragon, and when he accumulated so much magic that he became entertwined with the laws of physics and became an Elder Dragon, that is when he went insane. That was when he had the power of ONE elder dragon. Now Aurene has just absorbed the power of THREE elder dragons, AND the power of a Bloodstone nuke (that would have destroyed half of Tyria), AND the power of Joko (whatever that is supposed to be, the story never explained). Shouldn't she be going insane right now? Not considering later retcons. We'll get to those soon enough.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Let me see if I remember why GW2 is shit.

I know you posted this like a month ago, but I'd meant to reply to parts of it and forgot.

-Lots of loot variety but the prices are utter shit. Most items are suffering from extreme deflation.
No doubt a big brained move to make new players feel included, at the expense of there being any satisfaction when you found one item over another.

-Level Scaling to prevent you from enjoying planning your own growth curve.

These two points more or less go together and relate to some of your later considerations.

GW2 was always billed as a lateral progression game. You level up to max and then, after a brief time, gear up to the max gear level (or reasonably close to it) after a short time and then spend the rest of the time either getting the stats you want on it and/or going for cosmetics to look a particular way. It's not really a numbers go up sort of experience, it's more about build planning, exploration, and gaming in the sense of knowledge of your class/build mechanics, knowledge of the enemy encounter, and then general player skill such as timing or using your abilities in the correct sequence, etc.
I'd argue that GW2 could have dumped leveling altogether and the experience wouldn't have been too different other than you'd have no training wheels and would have to figure out all of your abilities at once instead of having them doled out to you over time. As it is, leveling to cap is ridiculously fast now.

-Top Gear and Level Up just for buying expansions.

I'm sorry was F2P boring? We'll spoil the expansions right as you purchase them!

No, because the expansions and game was never about leveling up and new shinies making your old gear invalidated. WoW would probably be more your speed if that's what you want. Even FFXIV gets away from this a bit.

-Skills have fuckall customization. By the time you've unlocked enough you no longer need any one build anymore.
By the time you have access to full customization there's nothing to customize.

I actually have no idea what you're getting at here. You can swap skills in and out, change weapons, etc. No, you can't modify your actual skills except through talent selections that may add duration, shorten cooldowns, etc. This is pretty standard.

-Battlefield is varied enough so you can't boast a truly supreme build. Which sounds like a good thing until you realize
the game is MMO-oriented so you literally never have an advantage overall.. ever.

Uh... so you want to dominate everything and not have any challenge based on a build that someone would post online that everyone would take?

-Skillbar is locked during combat, so the extra builds you want to swap to are not actually available despite enemies flooding you.
This ofcourse implies once you swap to the other build, you must wait AGAIN to leave combat again if you want to swap back.
Meaning virtually no combos are possible between the builds you bring to combat.
Likely another decision by ANET to encourage inclooosiveness of other players.

This is ... a little bizarre. You want to respec mid-combat, to remove any planning or actual building of builds so that everyone just has everything all the time?
You can combo with yourself, but you have to... build for it.
Yes, they would like you to play with other players. You can solo, but most MMOs would like you to play with other people, at least for some stuff.

-Combat is boring button crunching period. This is so more players can attack at once, and the number of players is the only "exciting" part.
It gets worse: you often can't see shit in such groups and the enemies are HP bloated. Thus combat is a joke.

Yeah, kinda. Pretty much any MMORPG turns into a clusterfuck once you start stacking people in one place. Did you ever do open world PVP in WoW back in the day when massive clashes could sometimes even crash servers? Good luck figuring out what was going on. Even something like Alterac Valley often turned into a complete unintelligible shitshow.

-The real complexity of combat is hidden in repetitive stacking of a common set of effects from the same boring skills.
To be fair there are Masteries you can level up and choose to use. But it's icing to your very very dry cake of an experience.

I suppose. It's not clear to me that GW2 is primarily a raid game, in the way that something like WoW is. It offers something different and it sounds like that's either not your cup of tea or you went in looking for something else and didn't notice that it was different and appreciate that. This is actually a big reason why I bounced off GW2 at launch. I just didn't "get" it. Hell, I didn't even when I first came back to it. It just sort of clicked at one point a month or two ago.

-There's no centralized main story. This is so you can explore the world freely and do boring shit that means nothing,
I mean live events, and once bored to tears you will use their Living Story system to participate in scraps of shit the writers make up
that live in their own separate immersive world affecting nothing outside of it.

Eh, they have a centralized main story. You probably figured that out already since Val the Moofia Boss has been detailing it above. It's just that there's not a whole lot of it. Anyway, MMO stories are boring af anyway which is why it's hard to even play them in a group because people will always skip cutscenes, skip reading, etc.

-Resource Nodes are ultra expensive and do jackshit. To add insult they only regrow every 24 hours.
Once you are a rich prick with multiple alts you will be able to make serious use of such nodes.
Except by then they my as well be decorations.

Yeah, ok. Uh... they're a super convenience item. If you want resources nodes, go out into the world and gather them. This is actually pretty retarded as a criticism tbh.

-Guild Halls are super expensive to acquire. The only cool things that could count as a real goal to acquire... i'll never get to experience.

... join a guild. Like holy fuck, there are max level guilds all over the place that will invite you for being able to breathe and click accept on the invite. They may not even talk to you first. Shit, if you want, join 5 guilds. You can.

-They made gold hard to farm from exploration or acquiring loot by killing random things. This was to force you to do quests and shit that is outside of your control,
and thus balanced more easily for the economy. You'll get your gold by chasing events/quests but the speed limit is fixed.

So... you're upset that you have to quest or do dailies to gain gold... or use the auction house. I have no idea what you want, this is pretty standard in the modern MMO space.

-STRANGELY: There are specific areas in the expansions where you can get quite a lot riches easily, but it's very repetitive areas.
That have specific items you need so as to gate you from truly taking advantage of said areas. Good, Bad, and Boring.

... so you can get gold easy. But you find it repetitive.
- Why do you even want gold? You don't care about cosmetics or builds, you can't get anything other than cosmetics and such with it... You can run around with 0 gold and have the same experience as if you had 90,000 gold.

-Big Brained designers thought PvE needed the ease of item customization of PvP.
They made it so anyone can pick the stats they want for the items they collect. Thus defeating the enjoyment of slowly earning customization from organic drops.

This is just not really true. There are some items you can choose stats for. Most you can't.

-ULTIMATELY: The game is about grinding through collectathons so you can get another skin of an item that is no better than anything you already own.

Unlike other MMOs that have you grind through sitting in raids for hours every week and then invalidate everything you spent all that time for whenever the next content drop happens, letting you start the treadmill over.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Anyway, the actual reason I came back to this thread was to post a few things I thought were funny as I was messing around on a low level Asura character.

Could blow up the world? Fuck it, let's give 'er a spin!

Being a genius goblin guy gets lonely.

I had to kill the God Emperor that was myself for great justice!

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The Asura are at their best when they're up to their inane shenagains.

MMO stories are boring af

I don't think MMO stories are inherently "boring". There are quite a few MMO stories I think are pretty engaging. The Alliance vs Horde storylines in Cataclysm (Gilneas and Silverpine Forest, Stonetalon Mountains, etc), and most of Mists of Pandaria. Final Fantasy XIV also had several story arcs I enjoyed.

I think the problem is that stories in MMOs weren't well presented until recently. After WoW became a smash hit, publishers only wanted to greenlight MMOs and the people who made those MMOs viewed story as an afterthought. Even if there was real thought put into the stories, they were told in walls of text. Even in retail WoW and GW2, which have eschewed walls of text and have more elaborate scripting, you're still mostly seeing the story play out from a detached third person camera with hardly any cutscenes. You can't really zoom in and see people's facial animations. That means most of the story is carried by the voice acting. You also have to deal with pivotal story moments being told in janky MMO game engines that weren't designed for these pseudo cutscene sequences in mind, so a lot of timing of animations and voices gets botched.

Even though publishers were only releasing MMOs, there was still an untapped demand for high production value RPGs (in the last 10 years, we had... Kingdoms of Amalur, Dragon Age III, Witcher III, and... that's it. There's other games like Divinity Original Sin, but that's isometric stuff with walls of text that has limited appeal), so RPG crowd got forced into playing MMOs since there was nothing else. In recent years, as the MMO craze has finally burned out and millennials began raising families and didn't have time to play MMOs as their fulltime job anymore, devs realized that a lot of people that are still sticking around are in it for the story (because, again, very little else out there to latch on to), which is why we see FF14 and GW2 focusing their development efforts on improving story presentation and making more story content over developing more MMO features. The latest FF14 and GW2 expansions, Endwalker and End of Dragons, have hardly any new content outside of the main questline.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

SWTOR is hands down the best story MMO, but it's basically a single-player game with an MMO tumor attached. Shame, because it's generally both high quality and has a ton of story content. If it was single-player, or just coop, it would easily be recognized as a proper continuation of the kotor series. Secret World is a close second.

On the upside, all the class stories are free(as in, completely free) to play and worth the time. If you like it, subscribe once to unlock everything up to that point(all expansions/whatever) permanently, one of the better monetization models in the genre.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

SWTOR is hands down the best story MMO, but it's basically a single-player game with an MMO tumor attached. Shame, because it's generally both high quality and has a ton of story content. If it was single-player online, or just coop, it would easily be recognized as a proper continuation of the kotor series. Secret World is a close second.

On the upside, all the class stories are free(as in, completely free) to play and worth the time. If you like it, subscribe once to unlock everything up to that point(all expansions/whatever) permanently, one of the better monetization models in the genre.

IIRC SWTOR made a novel attempt at trying to write all of the players into the story, rather than asking each player to pretend that they are the only hero and that the other players they are dungeoning with didn't exist. In cutscenes, the NPCs addressed the party of players as a whole. When a dialogue choice is to be made, the players vote for a dialogue choice, and after one minute the choice with the most votes is selected, with a random player being chosen to speak as the party's representative for the dialogue choice. Neat. The voting got quickly tiresome when you have multiple dialogue choices in a row and you had to wait up to a minute for everyone to cast their vote for each choice.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I don't think MMO stories are inherently "boring"...

Yeah, you make some good points. I mean, there have been a few high points in some MMOs I played for awhile. I don't think SWTOR is as good as rusty does, but certainly it makes the effort. WoW had a few moments before it all went to shit and FFXIV had one or two.

All that being said though, I think the general point still stands. Sure some players will stick out the cinematic or read quest text the first time, though this is far from universal and a reason I generally hate group questing since I hate feeling rushed and like to afk whenever I feel like it / need to. Certainly people don't want to do it more than once even though they'll replay the content for rewards, whether chaining endgame dungeons in WoW or running something like Duty Roulette in FFXIV and hoping to get Praetorium so you can afk for great justice!

More personally, I barely play single player games for the story, so it appeals to me even less in an MMO environment. But I appreciate your point that these games are gravitating more towards that cinematic theme park experience and the who cares about story situation is far from universal, especially considering all the praise FFXIV got for Shadowbringers.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

GW2 is a fun time waster, and the little compass pointing you to the next place to waste your time helps remove all the pesky thinking that usually goes along with that. And I actually mean that as a compliment, though it sounds rather backhanded. If you allow it, it can engross you in completing all the little map hearts or what have you to get the map completion prize, and do the little daily quest thingies, and what not.

I go back to it once in a while when I get bored with what I'm playing, or my brain is tired from all the thinking at work and all the dumb automation games I play like an idiot (You'd think I get enough of that at work). It's not a bad game, well worth the 20 bux I paid for it however long ago that was.

I tried getting into the PVP and WVW stuff, it's a different kind of fun time waster I guess but it's a bit more intense, and the way "building" a character works, I don't feel like there's much room to experiment.

I still have my little "Instant level 60" trinket, why in the hell would I use that? Isn't playing through various content and leveling your character basically the game?

My favorite thing to do is buy low and sell high in the auction house, although the way the tax works it's most efficient with lots of cheap stuff, so I end up trying to corner the turnip market or whatever. It's dumb but I made enough gold to buy enough gems for an extra character slot doing it. So many clicks lol, probably could have bought the gems for cheaper than the wear I put on my mouse.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I still have my little "Instant level 60" trinket, why in the hell would I use that? Isn't playing through various content and leveling your character basically the game?

You can only level up in vanilla zones and through SPvP. If you only really like doing expansion zones, running fractals, raiding, or WvW, then the level boosts help you play that content as a different class ASAP.

 

[Average Manatee]

You get leveled down if you go to pre-max level areas anyway, all being max level does is give you more buttons to press. Low level gameplay with only 3 or 4 buttons to press is really agonizing.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

You get leveled down if you go to pre-max level areas anyway, all being max level does is give you more buttons to press. Low level gameplay with only 3 or 4 buttons to press is really agonizing.

Yeah but what's the point of filling out all the map objectives if I'm not getting my precious XP and advancing?

I really enjoy the leveling up part of RPGs more than anything else I guess, so anything that lets me skip that seems totally pointless to me. I realize a lot of people like the max level play in MMOs so maybe I'm in the minority there I guess. I need a little bar filling up otherwise what's this all for man?

 

[mediocrepoet]

You get leveled down if you go to pre-max level areas anyway, all being max level does is give you more buttons to press. Low level gameplay with only 3 or 4 buttons to press is really agonizing.

Yeah but what's the point of filling out all the map objectives if I'm not getting my precious XP and advancing?

I really enjoy the leveling up part of RPGs more than anything else I guess, so anything that lets me skip that seems totally pointless to me. I realize a lot of people like the max level play in MMOs so maybe I'm in the minority there I guess. I need a little bar filling up otherwise what's this all for man?

You still get xp and other rewards, your level is just scaled down to make content reasonable. You also keep all your ability unlocks and gear quality, so you tend to nuke far lower level things anyway.

Even at level cap you get xp for mastery levels that grant additional abilities.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Icebrood Saga

In 2019, Arena Net was hit by layoffs. After season 4, GW2 wasn't greenlit for another expansion, but for another season of patch content. Patches don't attract interest in an MMO like expansions do, so when Anet announced the fifth season of patch content, they tried rebranding it as Icebrood Saga, claiming IBS would deliver "expansion level features" that would simply be distributed over time in patches rather than an all-in-one content drop.

Unfortunately, IBS was just that: a season of patch content. No "expansion level features" that were promised. It didn't introduce a new class, or new elite specializations, or a transformative feature like gliding or mounts, or a new guild hall, or a new WvW map, or a new SPvP mode, and so on. You just get more PvE maps and 1-2 hours of story per patch, just like you were getting in season 4. The new masteries are lackluster compared to the ones introduced previously. IBS does introduce Strikes (single boss fights with no trash or leadup, like FF14's trials), but that's just a lower budget replacement for raids and fractals. Consequently, IBS saw a large player dropoff. Unless you were into casual open world PvE or raiding, IBS offered nothing for you.

For the PvErs who did stick around for IBS, they were sorely disappointed. The story content started out on par with season 4... and then IBS was aborted so the studio could move on to working on the End of Dragons expansion. IBS only got 3 maps. Several plotlines were dropped, and the rushed ending was especially reviled.



Maps

The first map is Grothmar Valley. Grothmar is unique in in that you are not adventuring or waging war. There is no peril here, no monsters or bad guys to fight. Instead, it is a festival, and you run around doing non-combat events, such as helping a chef prepare food for a partying army, participating in a demolition derby, rocking out to a metal concert, racing, lighting bonfires, and so on. It's a fun, relaxing map, and a good breather episode after you've saved the world from three elder dragons. You get to enjoy a respite, and get some sense that the heroes' efforts thus far were worth it, that the world was preserved. It is also set in Ascalon and looks visually pleasant.

There is also a Branded area that has been purified by Aurene. The bright crystals and crystalized trees are quite nice. Wish this area was fleshed out more. A whole zone like this could have been nice.

The second map is Bjora Marches. It goes for that haunted dark forest feel. The music is pretty eerie. The map is covered in a blizzard that will freeze you to death if you are out in the cold for a couple minutes. You have to go stand by a fire to warm up or interact with a Raven statue to gain protection from the cold for 40 seconds. The map feels pretty atmospheric... for about 10 minutes, and then you realize that there is nothing to be afraid of. The mobs being braindead easy, and by this point you have a menagerie of mounts that allow you to trivially bypass the mobs. You can also mount up while you are taking damage from the blizzard and there are plenty of fires and Raven statues, you can warm up or gain protection within 10-15 seconds of riding. You are never in any danger of dying, despite the narrative constantly saying that Bjora is a dangerous place.

Bjora has a neat puzzle where you rotate mirrors and clear line of sight of obstructions to bounce ghost lights across the map.

The third map is Drizzlewood Coast. It is a WW2/Vietnam style war map set in a lush forest, like Yosemite National Park on an early morning. Looks great. The map gimmick is that the Frost Legion have planted dozens and dozens of snipers across Drizzlewood who will shoot you down.

Fortunately the same episode introduces a mastery that lets you cloak while mounted. Once you train that the snipers, aren't a problem anymore.

The fourth and final "map" is Dragonstorm, where the disembodied heads of Jormag and Primordus fight each other in a pit. Calling it a map would be generous. It's like calling the final area of Dragon's Stand where you fight the Mouth of Mordremoth a "map". It's a cool concept but terribly undercooked. Should have been a full map with build up to the actual climatic battle with the armies of Icebrood and Destroyers fighting each other. Would also have liked to have seen the full bodies of the two Elder Dragons.



Strikes

Replacing raids and fractals as competitive PvE group content are strikes. They are structured just like FFXIV's trials: your group ports into the arena with the raid boss right in front of you, and you only fight that one boss. No clearing trash up to the boss, no waiting for scripted RP, just bossfights. The low barrier of entry makes it easy for casuals to get in, see the story, and get out. The story build up is transferred to the one-off story instances. For hardcore raiders, it cuts out the fat that quickly becomes repetitive and old (clearing trash and RP) after the 20th week of clearing that content and lets them spend more time on what they're actually here for: boss fights.



Masteries

IBS masteries are lackluster compared to the ones introduced before. HoT, season 3, and season 4 introduced masteries that allowed you to unlock new areas of a map and changed how you traversed all maps. In IBS, the only transformative mastery is the ability to use Raven Gates, but Raven Gates only appear in Bjora marches. I suppose there is also the mounted invisibility mastery but Drizzlewood is the only map in the game where you are at serious risk of being killed while mounted. There is the United Legions Waystation mastery but that only allows you to burst down a break bar at the start of a fight. The other four mastery lines feel completely useless, just giving you stat increases for content you might hardly ever spend much time in (IBS maps and Dragon Response Missions). EoD introduces another stat mastery that buffs your stats (Jade Bots) but at least that one is useful everywhere.



Story

Prologue "Bound by Blood"

I tried looking around the festival, but I didn't see my father, Clement Forktail. He was a Flame Legion shaman, so maybe he could have had some interesting words to say about the treaty with the Flame Legion.

Why is Bangar being so hostile towards me, a Charr? Bangar wants to control an Elder Dragon. Guess who is the world's foremost expert on Elder Dragons, and has successfully raised one? Bangar thinks I control Aurene, so as far as he should know, recruiting me would be a package deal and secure him at least one Elder Dragon. I am everything Bangar desires.

It's strange that my boss, the Ash Legion Imperator, doesn't try to extract any juicy information from me.

Again, why is Bangar presuming that I am against him. Bangar has no way of knowing if I am idealogically opposed to his agenda. I was a member of the Ash Legion 7 years ago and fought against Ascalonian Ghosts for the glory of the Charr, and Bangar doesn't care what Legion you are from so long as you fight for the glory of the Charr. I only left because Zhaitan desecrated one of my warband mates, and Blood Tribune Brimstone ordered me to join one of the orders to fight against Zhaitan. By Bangar's reckoning, I should be a loyal and highly successful soldier.



Episode 1 "Whisper in the Dark"

It felt like hardly anything happened in this episode. You only find out that Almorra is dead and that Jormag is whispering to people. No progress is made on catching up to Bangar or defeating him.

Jormag's "you'll come to me when you need me" speech comes off as laughable. There is no greater threat on this planet than hostile Elder Dragons, and Jormag is one of them. Unless she is referring to the other two hostile dragons, in which case I've already killed three and have the aid of a benevolent Elder Dragon. I don't need Jormag's help. If Jormag was speaking truthfully, then perhaps she could have been referring to some sort of hidden, extra-terristrial threat that was planned before IBS was aborted. Jormag can't be referring to the threat of the world falling into the Void because according to season 2, as that can only happen once most if not all of the Elder Dragons are dead, and currently there are four out of six alive. By the time that happens it'd be unlikely for Jormag be alive by then.

Sorry, I just find it funny that such a transparent lie got a pre-rendered cutscene. Only makes sense budget wise if it was planned to set up something that was cut.

Why is Jhavi assuming she is the leader of the Vigil now? Efut is the next highest ranking Vigil leader after Almorra, and he participated in the campaign against Zhaitan, and has been presumably been running stuff in the background since then. After Efut is Laranthir, who participated in the campaign against Mordremoth, took command when Traehearne was captured and the Commander gallivanted off, reorganized the survivors of the crashed fleet, and led the army that killed the Mouth of Mordremoth. Either of them should become the next leader of the Vigil, not some random girl with no track record who was just introduced this episode.



Episode 2 "Shadow in the Ice"

It's bizzare seeing Rytlock and Braham giving in so easily towards the end. They already KNOW that Jormag operates by whispering to people. It's also pretty funny when you consider that Rytlock was giving Canach a bad rap in HoT, thinking that Canach would give in to the whispers of Mordremoth, but he didn't, while Rytlock gave in to the whispers of Jormag.



Visions of the Past: Steel and Fire

I find it interesting that it wasn't until 2020 that GW2 finally began doing the "you play as another character" thing that WoW had been doing since Wrath of the Lich King in 2008.

Does he not know that Aurene latched on to me while she was still inside her egg? Aurene seems to be a well known figure according to S4E6 (you had Sylvari from the Pale Tree hearing about Aurene's struggle and volunteering to join the fight on Dragonfall) and I'd imagine that the circumstances around her would be common knowledge as well. That I raised her from the moment she hatched? And that was when Aurene was weak and couldn't talk, before she was uplifted by absorbing magic. Jormag isn't a young, impressionable dragon. Jormag is a talking, powerful elder dragon. How do you tame a dragon older than known civilizaton? Also, I had the aid of the Exalted when I raised Aurene, who had been prepared by Glint specifically for that role. Bangar has no one. He's going to try to manipulate the master manipulator? I find it hard to believe that this guy somehow managed to ascend to the rank of Imperator and was respected by the other Imperators.



Episode 3 "No Quarter"

The writing really nosedives here. The writers forgot that these a Charr, not humans. Remember the 1-30 Charr storyline from vanilla? We Charr do not have human morality. We pillage tombs. We piss on graves. We enslave our enemies and work them to death in mines. We kill traitors and force our deserters to wander around the Black Citadel retelling their shameful story for 10 years before tossing them into a pit. We are conquerors. Now the game is acting as if we have a moral conscience, like we have some sort of convention that detailed "war crimes", and other nonsense.

It's also bizzare seeing the PC and Rytlock being aghast at what Smoldur did. Rytlock and I did worse in the 1-30 Charr storyline. And it's not like the PC and Rytlock grew a conscience over the years since then; just last season we raided Rata Primus and thoughtlessly killed non-combatant scientists and accountants and other paperwork clerks, not just evil scientists and people trying to kill us.

And then there is Imperator Smoldur. Yes, in the 1-30 Charr storyline he was depicted as being irritable, but he wasn't bloodthirsty or stupid like he is here. The Smoldur depicted in IBS is a completely different character, a moron who couldn't have possibly ascended to Iron Legion imperator, united the three legions, built the Black Citadel, and brokered a treaty with Kryta.

The PC, Rytlock, Smoldur, and the Charr as a whole have been character assassinated in IBS. IBS has the aesthetics of a Charr content pack - there's lots of Charr, rusted machinery, firery shamsn, etc - but the story isn't Charr at all. It's a measly human story.

The four Imperators decide to personally raid a secret Dominion base. Do I even need to point out how dumb this is? Setting aside whether or not going commando is a better use of a head of state's limited time than organizing from the back, they spend three minutes planning their attack right outside the front door. Why didn't you morons plan before you went up to the front door? Any Dominion door guard inside could overhear, open the door, chuck a grenade out and bam! The four legion's leadership is decapitated and Bangar wins. Morale among the United Legions is already very low and Charr are defecting in droves every day. Even if the Tribunes didn't fight amongst themselves over who became the new Imperators and quickly reorganized, the death of the Imperators would be a shock that would probably cause the United Legions to just completely surrender.



Episode 4 "Jormag Rising"

Ryland snipes Imperator Smoldur.

If Ryland had used a rocket launcher or chucked a grenade down, he would have eliminated all of the Imperators and won the war. Also, why didn't we use portals to assasinate people before? Sure would've come in handy when we dealt with the Flame Legion back or Zhaitan's lieutenants in vanilla, or Scarlet in season 1, or the White Mantle in season 3, or Joko in season 4, etc.

Another episode full of immersion breaking snark, mocking fantasy journey tropes, as if the writers are afraid of playing them straight when that is exactly what GW2 players want out of the story.

Braham and the PC also mock the Norn gods... the same gods they are trying to ingratiate and call upon for help. Great plan guys. Also rather unwise given that the gods in this setting can strike you down on the spot for irreverence. Braham has been very reverent of the Norn gods... but now he's treating them as a joke?

Crecia is a bitch. She puts down Rytlock and give snide remarks about her comrades at every turn. I don't require every character to be pleasant all of the time, but this just isn't enjoyable to listen to at all.

Wait a minute, we're seriously playing the pronoun game now? Since when did Jormag become a "they"? Jormag was established as male in vanilla. Everyone called Jormag a male up to IBS. Then Icebrood Saga gave a woman's voice to Jormag, so presumably Jormag's gender was retconned for creative reasons, to do something different with one of the villainous Elder Dragons since we had three storylines about male Elder Dragon villains. But how on earth do the characters ingame go from calling Jormag a male to calling Jormag a "they"? What, did Jormag drop by Lion's Arch and put out a press release telling people to address her as a "they"?

Jormag can enslave people and turn them into Icebrood in droves simply by being in close proximity. Jormag can also turn into an intangible blizzard. Jormag can also open portals to travel to and from the Mists. Also, Jormag has acquired Zhaitan's death magic. She can kill people and raise them as her minions, just as we saw one of Kralkatorik's minions do in S4E2. There is no reason why Jormag can't just suddenly appear over every major city on the planet and enslave everyone. Icebrood retain their intelligence, so it's not like her minions would become dumb or she would need to leave geniuses untouched so that they can come up with solutions she cannot. Jormag's actions make no sense.



Episode 5 "Champions"

Primordus, the lava Elder Dragon, gets shoehorned into the ICEbrood Saga. The storyline that is supposed to be about fighting Jormag. Primordus was put to sleep in season 3 episode 5 and was literally never heard from again until this episode where he comes out of absolutely nowhere. As far as I can tell, there is no explanation as to why his Destroyers suddenly invaded Tyria. By this point, IBS was aborted and Anet was rushing to work on the End of Dragons expansion. For whatever reason, someone at Anet decided that they wanted to get the Elder Dragon storyline over and done with ASAP, so Primordus is brought back and is then killed off in the same episode, killing off any hope of an underground expansion with him.

This episode also introduces Dragon Response Missions. You teleport into an instanced version of old maps and fight waves of generic Icebrood or Destroyers. In other words, the devs ran out of time and budget for the season. 3 of the DRMs had engaging story (the one where Owl sacrifices to deny Jormag more power, and the one with the Tengu). The other 9 felt like boring filler.

There is one notable DRM: Lake Doric. A creative environment artist put some effort into making it look frozen over. It feels exciting to rediscover an old place like this. If the other DRM maps had been altered as such, the DRMs would have been more interesting.

Lake Doric from S3E5.

Lake Doric from the IBS Dragon Response Mission, four years later.

Another problem with DRMs (and this episode as a whole) is that you fight vanilla Destroyer and Icebrood models for 6 hours straight. They look painfully bland and uninspired compared to the later Elder Dragon minions you fight in the game, such as the Mordrem or the Branded. Jormag and Primordus deserved expansion budgets dedicated to them and aesthetic redesigns of their armies.

In the DRMs, the Icebrood and the Destroyers attack villages. You rescue survivors, put out fires, build barricades, hand out weapons, etc, but the tension is undermined by the lack of consequences. None of the villages are destroyed. No major NPCs are killed. After the DRM is over, it's as if nothing happened to that village.

I had various thoughts about IBS' absurd handling of the Elder Dragon magic and the flagrant flagrant disregard for the rules that had been established prior. Jormag and Primordus not using the Zhaitan, Mordremoth, and Kralkatorik powers they had previously acquired. Aurene not exploding or going insane. Braham merging with an Elder Dragon with no repercussions. The plan to kill Primordus and Jormag by manipulating ley lines that comes out of absolutely nowhere... and so on. I considered breaking down each point in detail, but the writers clearly don't give a hoot about their own metaphysics anymore, so neither will I. Let's move on.

Jormag: "Primordus is stronger than me! I dare not face him in combat. Protagonist, team up with me so we can beat him! I intend to live forever!"
Also Jormag: "I'm going to force his jaws apart and commit double suicide with him!"

I want to know who at Anet thought that this was a good idea. Either Jormag should have used cunning to defeat Primordus, or Primordus should have melted that ice dragon in his mouth.



Final thoughts

First episode was great. Episodes 2 and 3 got sidetracked but were still enjoyable. Then IBS got cancelled in favor of the next expansion and you reach Drizzlewood, and the plot goes off the rails. The last episode is awful. I didn't like Jhavi and I found Crecia insufferable. Primordus was wasted. Jormag's actions made no sense. Charr civil war wasn't a Charr story at all and greatly damaged their culture by homogenizing them. Everyone starts acting like an idiot beginning in Drizzlewood. GW2's Elder Dragon storyline is a metaphysics heavy plot, and the metaphysics make no sense anymore.